Diameter of a killing

I wrote this a while back and've been sitting on it and I'm not sure why. So here we go....

I read a poem once titled “The Diameter of the Bomb.”

I remember the short piece measured a bomb in inches. Then it sized the physical damage caused by the bomb in feet. Then it gauged the bomb’s impact on a community measured in miles. Then it linked that community to the whole world, expanding the diameter of the bomb to the entire, damaged planet.

I went to a shooting today.

At one point this afternoon, someone’s finger squeezed the trigger on a pistol. A small spring-loaded pin was released and it struck a metal casing around a bullet, which came from a box of lots of bullets, which came from a factory where millions of bullets are made.

A tiny primer went off in this bullet’s brass cartridge, igniting the round’s main charge. The expanding gas caused by the burning gunpowder pushed a small piece of metal out of a tube and into a man’s head.

When I got to the scene the body was already covered with a sheet and police and emergency personnel were doing their unhappy duty. Family came and screamed and cried. A crowd was gathering.

The yellow tape lines kept growing outward, farther and farther.

The diameter of the bullet was only a fraction of an inch when it was fired Sunday afternoon. But by night it had already grown halfway across Shelby, North Carolina, to encompass a young photojournalist who was having trouble getting to sleep.

So he wrote this.